Spicy Healthy Sauteed Tofu - Healthy Food Tip and Recipe

Today's Recipe
If you don't know what to serve for dinner tonight ...
This is a wonderful meat-free addition to your Healthiest Way of Eating that only contains 164 calories! Enjoy!
Spicy Healthy Sautéed Tofu
Prep and Cook Time: 25 minutes
Ingredients:

• 1 TBS dried arame or hijiki sea vegetables*
• 12 oz firm tofu, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
• 3/4 cup chopped scallion
• 1 TBS minced fresh ginger
• 4 dried shiitake mushrooms
• 2 TBS soy sauce
• 2 TBS mirin rice wine
• pinch of red chili flakes to taste
• salt and white pepper to taste
• *For more on the safety of sea vegetables, see this article

Directions:

1. Soak dried shiitake mushrooms in 1/2 cup water until soft (about 15 minutes). Slice, removing the stem. Retain mushroom soaking water.
2. Place tofu on paper towels to drain some of the moisture while you prepare the other ingredients.
3. Rinse and soak sea vegetables in warm water while preparing rest of ingredients. Squeeze out excess water before adding.
4. Add the mushroom water to a 10-inch stainless steel skillet and bring to a boil. Add ginger, sea vegetables, mushrooms, scallion, mirin, and tofu, and simmer for 10 minutes.
5. Add soy sauce, red pepper flakes, salt and pepper. Simmer for about 5 minutes.

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In-Depth Nutritional Profile for Spicy Healthy Sautéed Tofu
Healthy Food Tip

Why do you have tomatoes listed in the vegetables section instead of the fruit section?

When we chose to create food categorizations for the website, which I adapted for The World's Healthiest Foods book, we needed to decide whether to do so based upon botanical guidelines or culinary guidelines. We chose the latter because we felt that it would be of better service to readers since most people are used to thinking of food in terms of how they use it rather than scientific explanations.
This is the reason we put tomatoes (as well as other "fruits" such as avocados and bell peppers) under the vegetables category. It is also why that we chose to include foods such as quinoa and buckwheat, which are seeds and not botanically "grains," in the whole grains section and why we also placed peanuts, which are botanically a legume, in the nuts category. For those foods that are categorized according to culinary rather than botanical classification, I make a note of this in that food's chapter or website write-up.
For more information on this topic, please see:

• Tomatoes